However, the official builds' developer had requested that unofficial builds not bear the 'Sumatra' name. However, some users requested 64-bit builds of Sumatra and other developers had compiled unofficial 64-bit builds which loaded documents faster than the 32-bit builds. Initially, Kowalczyk did not release a 64-bit version of Sumatra, indicating that while it might offer slightly more speed and available memory, he believed at that time that it would greatly add to user confusion and that the benefits would not outweigh the potential costs. Support for Windows 95, 98 and ME has since been removed. Īs it was first designed when Windows XP was the current version of Windows, Sumatra initially had some incompatibilities with earlier versions of Windows. The source code is provided with support for Microsoft Visual Studio. The source code is developed in two programming languages, mostly in C++, with some components in C. Sumatra PDF is written mainly by two contributors: Krzysztof Kowalczyk and Simon Bünzli. Since version 0.9.4, Sumatra supports the JPEG 2000 format. Sumatra supports SyncTeX, a bidirectional method to synchronize TeX source and PDF output produced by pdfTeX or XeTeX. Sumatra is multilingual, with 69 community-contributed translations. Since version 0.9.1, hyperlinks embedded in PDF documents have been supported. This resulted in very large spool files and slow printing. Through version 1.1, printing was achieved by rasterizing each PDF page to a bitmap. Other open-source readers like Okular and Evince make this optional, and Debian patches software to remove these restrictions, in accord with its principles of interoperability and re-use. Kowalczyk stated 'I decided that will honor PDF creator's wishes'. The PDF format's use restrictions were implemented in Sumatra 0.6, preventing users from printing or copying from documents that the document author restricts, a form of Digital Rights Management. In January, 2017, the latest version of SumatraPDF, 3.1.2, had a single 6.1 Mb executable file in comparison, Adobe Reader XI used 320 MB of disk space.

In 2009, Sumatra 1.0 had a 1.21 MB setup file, compared to Adobe Reader 9.5's 32 MB. Īs is characteristic of many portable applications, Sumatra uses little disk space. This classifies it as a portable application to read PDF, XPS, DjVu, CHM, eBooks (ePub and Mobi) and Comic Book (CBZ and CBR) formats. Sumatra was designed for portable use, as it consists of one file with no external dependencies, making it usable from an external USB drive, needing no installation. For rendering PDFs, it uses the MuPDF library. Sumatra has a minimalist design, with its simplicity attained at the cost of extensive features.

Portable pdf viewer